Minutiae

The people who made Snakes on a Plane should be stripped of their SAG memberships, their director's chairs, and every business card in their Rolodexes that are remotely related to Hollywood. The movie has perhaps the campiest title of any film in the past four decades, has relied almost solely on Internet hype as marketing, and capitalizes on the public's glee at hearing Samuel L. Jackson scream profanities. Without a doubt, Snakes is the single dumbest idea for a movie that has made it through to production in the last five years. It's barely even a movie; at best, it's a bunch of calculated beats of horror and action thrown into a paper-thin plot. And yet, for all the same reasons, it's awesome.

( Please, though, no sequels... )

It should come as no surprise that Matrix trilogy veteran Keanu Reeves was cast as the lead in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel about drugs and paranoia in a police state seven years in our future. The role of Bob Arctor, a personality split between a Substance D addict and a faceless undercover "Agent Fred" charged with narcing himself out, is one that perhaps only Reeves can master, so seasoned is his familiarity with altered mental states. And, after watching the film, it seems only natural that Linklater was the one responsible for bringing the tale to the screen: his patented rotoscoping technique, in which he computer animates live action film, is the perfect medium for bringing the audience into the same anxious haze as the characters. In fact, there's not much surprising about the makeup of A Scanner Darkly - it is even being praised as the most faithful word-to-screen translations that Dick's work has received. The only surprise, then, is how well it all works together.

( Should we list all the reasons I want a scramble suit? )

It's fascinating how Steve Carell has tiptoed up from behind us to become one of the best, most versatile comedic actors of at least the last ten years: as scene stealer (in Anchorman and Bruce Almighty), leading man (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or ensemble member in a TV show full of hilarious actors (The Daily Show, The Office), Carell has not wasted a second on screen. He can play a loud dolt, a lovable loser, or an arrogant jerk and still be funny every time. In Little Miss Sunshine, the dark, subtle, broken comedy by first-time screenwriter Michael Arndt, Carell knocks it out of the park again as Frank, a gay scholar recovering from a suicide attempt, showing that he can excel in any role.

( Not that he doesn't have plenty of help... )

One would think that aren't many people more qualified to bring an update of the 80's cop drama "Miami Vice" to the big screen than Michael Mann. Acclaimed for his directorial work on films including The Insider and Collateral, Mann has become known for his slick visual style and his dark, understated storytelling. On top of all that, he was there at the beginning of "Vice" and executive produced the thing for five years; if anyone were to prepare Crockett and Tubbs for movie life, it'd be Mann. Judging by the totality with which Mann's update fails, then, perhaps it's safe to assume that all our memories of "Vice" should be kept wrapped in pastel linen suits.

( Patience is a virtue, but Mann's snail pace is a vice... )

At some point, you have to wonder how many times Will Ferrell can successfully trap his comedic lightning in a bottle. Sure, he's had his instances of misfire, mostly when he tries too hard to put a dramatic spin on his mania (Bewitched) or takes a small role in an eclectic arthouse film (the terrible A Winter Passing), but when Will Ferrell decides to just be himself - the sometimes arrogant, often empty headed man-child we've seen in Elf, Old School, and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - it's gold. Anchorman, in particular, has rocketed Ferrell's stock higher than most people could have imagined: it started as a mid-level comedy that did well in the box office, but with the release of the DVD it has turned into a phenomenon. Ferrell teamed back up with Anchorman writer/director Adam McKay on Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and as far as I can tell, they've struck that gold again.

( Even if the jokes don't come as fast as Bobby drives... )

When a book is turned into a movie, there are, more often than not, considerable cuts to make. Multiple background characters are sometimes rolled into one sidekick, main character histories are glossed over in favor of starting in media res, and motivations are explained on the fly to make way for plot advancement. From what I understand of Lauren Weisberger's "The Devil Wears Prada," the opposite tactic was used in readying the story for the screen; the most used adjective describing her book is "glossy," as if there's not much beneath the high sheen of what's on the page. The film adaptation, while keeping much of the veneer that I assume the book has, is not quite as shallow as it lets on, and the added depth lets the actors, particularly genius Meryl Streep, a chance to breathe in their roles.

( Warning: Adjectives like divine and delicious may lie ahead... )

You have to give M. Night Shyamalan credit for his body of work. He's often panned as a one-hit wonder, that hit being 1999's The Sixth Sense. But Shyamalan has created entertaining films in Signs, The Village, and the criminally underrated Unbreakable. Though his latest effort, Lady in the Water, may not join the ranks of his other films - it's by far his most self-serving, egotistical venture to date, and it doesn't have the fresh bite of Sixth Sense - but it certainly doesn't deserve the beating it's getting from critics.

Based on a bedtime story that Shyamalan told his children, which in itself is possibly an amalgamation of other fairy tales, Lady in the Water tells the tale of Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), the superintendent at a Philadelphia-area (if you say so, M. Night) apartment complex called The Cove. The tenants complain to Heep about an unseen late-night swimmer in their community pool, and one night, he finds the cause: Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), a young sea nymph from the Blue World. Together with the residents, Heep must find a way to get Story home before a terrifying beast gets to her.

( An interesting Story peeks out of a Heep of bad scripting... )

Everybody has some experience with the creepy house down the block. Legend has it that the place is haunted, and even though all the kids know that nobody lives there, the window shades somehow are open one day and closed the next. There's even websites dedicated to all the creepy places that people claim are haunted (scroll about a quarter of the way down the page, and see the high school my sister went to in Drexel Hill). It should be no surprise, then, that this almost universal childhood experience made its way into a movie. The only real head scratcher is why Monster House, a brilliantly balanced family-comedy- meets-horror-film, was released in the middle of the summer and not at Halloween.

( Actually, it's so the DVD can sell then, but that's not the point... )

It's almost hard to believe that it was twelve years ago that Kevin Smith first took Hollywood by storm with Clerks, his grainy, black and white opus to his own life as a counter jockey at a local convenience store. Smith has since become a cult hero, a champion for aspiring film makers who have plenty of attitude but no budget, and a figurehead for geeks in mainstream culture. And though his movies haven't always resonated with the majority of America - and his last film, Jersey Girl, was pandered by critics and fans alike (I'm on the record as a low-level fan of the flick) - he's remained a respected storyteller and a successful pusher of his own brand. As a present to his friend Jason Mewes, who went into a battle with drugs and came out the other side sober, Smith decided to revisit the scene of the crime that made him so popular in the first place.

( A pack of smokes and a Mooby burger, please... )

Count me among the many who just don't understand the appeal of the brothers Wilson. While I've almost uniformly enjoyed every movie I've seen either Luke or Owen in, I consider them opportunists. Each time around, they've found themselves surrounded by better, funnier actors, and their job is to poke their head into the plot every so often and insert a decent joke. Owen's had some decent success with Zoolander (featuring a much funnier Ben Stiller) and Wedding Crashers (sharing time with the hilarious Vince Vaughn), and Luke scored big in Old School (thanks to Vaughn and Will Ferrell). Maybe the best work done by the brothers is in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums; in fact, it's the only movie in which they are both what I'd consider funny. The real test for one Wilson's skill comes in You, Me and Dupree, in which Owen shoulders the brunt of the comedic load, with straight man Matt Dillon and vanilla-ice-cream-in-a-sugar-cone Kate Hudson, who is known more for her looks than her laughs.

( What happens to buddy comedies when the leads aren't buddies? )

I remember seeing trailers for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and thinking that it was going to be really, really dumb. Don't get me wrong; I love pirates (more on that later this week), but the idea for the movie just looked terrible. Then I saw it. And wow, was I ever wrong. Johnny Depp redefined cool as Captain Jack Sparrow, <td valign="top">Orlando Bloom</td><td valign="top" nowrap="1"></td> showed he could be an interesting character, and, well, Keira Knightley is pretty. Really pretty. Besides, watching the movie was just about the most fun I had in a theater that year or almost any since. As soon as I walked out of the movie, I knew that there would be a sequel, and probably a trilogy before all was said and done. After all, it seems that every big summer blockbuster these days gets turned into a trilogy, not matter how ill advised. But Pirates had a chance to be different, because it came from virtually nowhere to give new life to the swashbuckling comedy. That very same fact made me wary going into the second film of the trilogy, Dead Man's Chest. After all, this one came will all those damn... expectations.

( Yo ho ho...shut up about the rum... )

Call me a sucker for temporal displacement. I enjoy watching films that rise to the challenge of explaining time travel, a subject so vastly removed from real science that it's left to the hands of H.G. Wells or Robert Zemeckis to explain to us. There's just too many fascinating problems that have to be dealt with, whether it be a simple mental paradox or the entire disruption of the space-time continuum. There are plenty of movies that try to take on the logical mess known as time travel, with some significant successes. The interesting thing about these successes is that they span all genres, from action (The Terminator series) to comedy (the Back to the Future series) to serious drama (Frequency). Each takes a different view on the challenges, science, and consequences of jumping to another time to prevent or ensure a certain event. The latest attempt at this comes in The Lake House, a story of two people who fall in love despite the greatest of chasms between them - time.

( Give it points for Keanu making it through without a single woah... )

It's a risky business, getting involved in comic book movies. So often, the people you are directly marketing the movie to will begin to trash your decisions eight months before you even begin filming. There are decades of comic canon to be followed, or at least faithfully reimagined. And there's nothing worse than a geek scorned; he will, without a doubt, spend all of his free time (and there's plenty of it) scouring message boards armed with the latest venom about your film. At the same time, if you too closely follow the mythology that's been set up by hundreds of comic writers, you risk turning off an entire possible fan base that hasn't been exposed to the source material. Equally, it's a risky business being a viewer who has his feet in both camps, as I often do.

It's been years since I've seen any of the Superman movies, and, if you really think about it, Christopher Reeve wasn't my Superman. If anybody would have been considered my Superman, my Clark Kent, it would have to be Dean Cain in "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman." It would even be less of a stretch to say that "Smallville's" Tom Welling is a more influential Kal-El to me than Reeve was. And let's face it, if anybody is going to be a convincing Lex Luthor to me, it's got to be Michael Rosenbaum. Even so, I couldn't help but get wrapped up in the excitement surrounding Superman Returns, which follows the canon set up by Richard Donner's Superman I and II.

( Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a kick-ass movie! )

In today's corporate world, most people have figured out that balancing career and family is a difficult task. If you want to be CEO of a top insurance firm, you may have to sacrifice your plan of getting married at 23; if you decide you want three kids before you're thirty, you might want to settle into a job that gives you the flexibility to watch them grow up. Because if one thing is abundantly clear in the pursuit of work/family balance, it's that there's very often not enough time in the day for both.

In Click, Michael Newman (Adam Sandler) has come to terms with this in his own way. He's an up and coming architect and wants to make partner one day, so he often brings his work home, forgoing time with his family in favor of getting ahead. And though his heart is in the right place - he does it all to make a better life for his family - his gung ho attitude towards work disappoints them. In a vain effort to get some control where he can, he storms out of the house one night in search of a universal remote control, figuring that he should at least be able to figure out a way to rein in the technology and toys that litter his house. He goes to the "Beyond" section of his local Bed, Bath & Beyond, where he runs into Morty (Christopher Walken), a weird clerk who give Michael a remote that will do just what he wants: control everything. Michael soon finds out exactly what "everything" means.

( Walken on Sunshine... )

Let's get one thing straight: I hate Napoleon Dynamite. Unequivocally and without proper adverbs to describe breadth, I despise that movie. I remember sitting in the theater, my twenty-something friend and I surrounded by giggling fifteen-year-olds, not quite understanding what was so funny about the stoner voice that Jon Heder lent to Napoleon, or to fifty percent of the stupid but quotable lines that have wound up sneaking their ways onto t-shirts and even into my own vocal arsenal. My older brother gave me a copy of the DVD as a gag gift for Christmas, and I have yet to watch it again. The only bit of the film I've seen beyond that theatre visit and an attempt to watch the whole thing at a friend's house was of the prom scene, and I only put myself through it because I was cruising past HBO and recognized Napoleon's love interest, Tina Majorino, as Mac from Veronica Mars. So, um, yeah. Napoleon and I are not friends.

Let's understand another thing: I love Jack Black. I've loved Jables ever since I saw him in High Fidelity, maybe even before. I am a Tenacious Devotee, having seen Jack and Kyle in concert and knowing almost every word on the D CD. I will be one of the first people at the theatre to see Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. I love Jack unquestioningly and uncritically. He is, without a doubt, one of the funniest men on the planet. Knowing these two facts, you must understand what a quandary I was in when I decided to see Nacho Libre, which stars Jables and was co-written by Jack's School of Rock conspirator Mike White, but featured writing and producer credits by Jared Hess, creator of Napoleon's idiotic world.

( He's only the best lucha libre wrestler in Mexico...GOSH! )

Twenty years ago, a computerized architect's lamp bounced around on a computerized ball until it burst, and a giant in animation and imagination was born. When the innovative company, Pixar, teamed up with Disney to create Toy Story, the giant became a legend, and the figurehead of a new movement in family film. Pixar celebrated its twentieth anniversary this year by releasing its seventh feature-length film, Cars.

A lot has been made on the film geek sites I read - too much, in my opinion - of what the focus of Cars suggests about American culture, namely the proliferation of NASCAR and of comedian Larry The Cable Guy, who voiced dim-witted two truck Mater in the film. I, for one, don't mind racing, and consider Mr. The Cable Guy as "harmless annoying gimmick comedian of the year," someone we will forget about as quickly as some of us embraced him. To look at these aspects of the movie is to cheat Pixar's animators and writers out of the credit they deserve for picking up the slack for Disney's sputtering cartoon division, which has all but disappeared after 2001's Atlantis: The Lost Empire (and for good reason...there's a special place in bargain bin hell for movies like that). Since Toy Story, Pixar has done nothing but show it can tell a damn fine story with the right combination of good lessons for kids and good jokes for adults. Cars is no exception.

( This is just a taste of how awesome Transformers will be... )

Let's be honest for a second. Why do we go to movies? If you asked a hundred people that question and tried to boil the myriad answers into one universal solution, it would probably go like this: we go to the movies to escape from our real world, to immerse ourselves in worlds, situations, and characters that are a bizarre exaggeration of reality. If we can find a nugget of cosmic truth in the absurdist tales, all the better. We empathize with hobbits, we learn our lessons from CGI-created Slinky dogs, we question our faith based on literature that sells itself as fiction. Okay, maybe I'm still a little bitter about the whole Da Vinci Code argument. But the point is that we go to the movies because we want to see something up there that isn't our lives, because we get sick and tired of our lives every once in a while.

In The Break-Up, hailed as the on-screen debut of the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston celebrity relationship (I think it's over now, but what did we call it? Vaughniston?), director Peyton Reed departs from this otherworldly leaning in film. His main characters feel relatively realistic. Gary (Vaughn) is a fast-talking, wise-cracking bus tour guide in business with his brothers. Brooke (Aniston) works in a ritzy art gallery, and she's maybe just a bit less ritzy than she would like to be. In the opening scene of the film, before the title credits even roll, you see that Gary nabbed Brooke at a Cubs game, where he convinced her that if the guy she was with wasn't most definitely Mr. Right, she might as well be dating him. It's a quirky, sweet, funny opener, in which you're set up for a very cute, fun movie.

( If only the movie continued on that way... )

Ignoring early promise, the 'X' franchise goes out with a whimper.

I'll never be the comic book geek that two of my closest friends are, and I see that as a good thing. It allows me to go into superhero movies without a sense of entitlement. I ask nothing of these super-powered films than to be entertaining and engaging. I don't run the risk of getting upset if someone's spandex is the wrong hue of blue, or if someone's origin story is less than a letter-perfect adaptation of the graphic series on which it is based. It's because of this outlook that I could immensely enjoy the first X-Men and Spider-man movies, even when my comic-loving friends nitpicked them before we rose from our theatre seats, and especially when the second installments were markedly better.

One of the reasons that I loved the first two X-Men movies is the infinite possibilities they presented. I remember walking out of X2: X-Men United marveling that the series could go on for ten or more installments without even running into the problem of re-hiring too many actors. I figured that the third story could wrap up the Wolverine storyline and even include some smaller arcs about the older X-Men, and by the time a fourth movie came around, Hugh Jackman wouldn't even have to be in it. We could instead take a look at the mutant world through Kitty Pryde, or revisit the Rouge storyline that underscored the first two films. And, despite the angry reviews from the comic geeks I had read about X-Men: The Last Stand, I walked into the third (and presumably final) installment of the franchise still hoping for something along those lines.

( This is what happens when your director decides Krypton is a better place to work... )

'Da Vinci' decoded on screen.

First, a quick note in which I add my two cents to the already oversized piggy bank of thought on Dan Brown and Christianity: if The Da Vinci Code changes your faith, you're an idiot. And not one who believes in anything very strongly to begin with, if something clearly filed in the fiction section of your local library or Border's can shake the fundamentalism out of you. If you're one of those people who spend all their time shouting at the rain, assuring true believers that the conclusions made in The Da Vinci Code are false and that Dan Brown's research is faulty, you're an idiot. The Church, in any form, has way more important things to worry about than whether a work of fiction is changing people's beliefs. Go get a more welcoming, less archaic infrastructure and you'll keep the Christians/Catholics you still have, instead of frightening away those of us who wanted to be entertained for a few days or a few hours by a story about the Knights Templar. </rant>

It's summer blockbuster season, and for most films, that means it's time to leave the logical half of your brain at home and fill the void with explosions and popcorn. How, then, does the year's most maze-like movie make it into theaters now, instead of, say, November, when serious Oscar contenders are being released? Quite simply because more people come to the movies in the summer, and if there's one movie that a ton of people are going to see, it's The Da Vinci Code, and the summer's rising temperature can only boost those attendance numbers.

( The only thing better than Ron Howard and Russell Crowe is Ron Howard and Tom Hanks... )

'Art School' rather amusing, not very affecting.

Okay, I didn't see Bad Santa or Ghost World. The name Terry Zwigoff means nothing to me. Yet somehow, the mention of these two movies in the ad campaign for Art School Confidential made me want to see it just as much as seeing John Malkovich in the trailer did. Call me a sucker for a good attempt at advertising. If you can promo Space Jam the right way, I'll see it and try my best to not show prejudice based on the fact that Shawn Bradley is involved.

Art School's focus is on Jerome (Max Minghella), a talented young artist who, because he has no other place to go after high school polarized him, chooses the supposedly ritzy Strathmore Institute as his place of higher learning, to sharpen his penciling skills and perhaps snatch the girl of his dreams. She is Audrey (Sophia Myles), an art model who has been jaded by her father's aging fame in the field and her line of relationships with artists. The perfect world that Jerome sees in Strathmore's promotional brochure (which includes a picture of Audrey, which, knowing promotional college material, says to me she's at least three years older than when the picture was taken) turns out to be, well, not so much: the school is located on the fringe of the ghetto, there's a string of serial murders working through the local population and the student body, and everywhere he looks, Jerome's artistic talent and integrity are insulted by the lowest common denominator, i.e., crappy art being praised simply because it's weird. Jerome does his best to stick to his guns, but learns that if he really wants the attention of both Audrey and the artists he aims to impress, he's going to have to rage against the machine.

( It's got Frankie Stechino in it; it's gotta be good...right? )